


Seisin

by visiblemarket



Series: Foundations [3]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars: Shattered Empire
Genre: F/M, adventures on yavin iv, livin' their lives, nothing tragic will happen to these two individuals ever i swear, puttin' down roots, space latinxs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-07
Updated: 2016-04-07
Packaged: 2018-05-31 21:11:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6487558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/visiblemarket/pseuds/visiblemarket
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Shara Bey Dameron, barely two days into retirement from military service, twenty-six years old at last reckoning, exhausted and anxious and strangely hollow, walks out into the familiar muggy atmosphere of Yavin IV with unsteady legs, blinks at the bright red glare of the nearby gas giant, and takes what feels like the first free breath of her life.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seisin

**Author's Note:**

> [This song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80yBxqWeuIk) came up on random shuffle last night while I was trying to write another fic entirely, and instead, I wrote this.

She leaves her A-Wing behind, taking one of the transport shuttles that’ve started making semi-regular jumps to the new Outer Rim settlements instead.

The Force Tree stays too, watched over by Please-Call-Me-Luke-No-Really Skywalker, who’s promised to start putting together a guide for the Care and Keeping of Living Force Artifacts. Shara Bey, who’s never owned so much as a houseplant, gets the feeling she’s going to need that, whenever she gets around to actually planting the thing.

Her son is on a far-off planet that she can’t know too much about, for his own safety; her father is with him.

Most of her friends, meticulously hoarded over the course of a war like spare ammunition, are dead; most of her belongings fit in the single, sturdy canvas bag by her side.

Shara Bey Dameron, barely two days into retirement from military service, twenty-six years old at last reckoning, exhausted and anxious and strangely hollow, walks out into the familiar muggy atmosphere of Yavin IV with unsteady legs, blinks at the bright red glare of the nearby gas giant, and takes what feels like the first free breath of her life.

Kes greets her with open arms and the kind of strong, steady permanence that always seems impossibly exaggerated in her memory, but has yet to disappoint in reality. She buries her face in his neck and he strokes her hair, murmuring her name and pressing kisses to her temple.

They spend far too long like that, wrapped up in each other — Kes finally pulls back, hands on her shoulders, getting a good look at her.

“Lieutenant,” he says, giving her a brisk, formal nod.

“Sergeant,” she says, in kind, or tries to: her voice cracks a little, and Kes’s features flicker with concern.

“Good flight?”

“Would’ve been better if I’d made it,” she says, automatically, and Kes smiles.

“I bet, flygirl. You wanna go drop off your stuff?” She nods, and he wraps an arm over her shoulder, picks up her bag with the other hand, and leads her back through the base.

It’s strange to see it like this, dark and almost empty, echoing with their footsteps. There’s patches of light, pockets of activity here and there, unfamiliar people (from the new government, Shara assumes, but doesn’t ask) at make-shift _desks_ , where maps and holographic arrays once were.

Kes guides her back to the old officers' quarters. She raises her eyebrows in surprise. “Hey, they gave me this room,” he says, as he toss her bag onto the bed, which is about twice the size of anywhere Shara’s ever slept.

Shara finds herself staring at it, trying to remember how long it’s been since she’s actually gotten a full night’s sleep. Kes pauses his matter-of-fact rundown of all the features included in an officers’ bunk and gives her a gentle look. “You wanna stick around? Get some rest first?”

She thinks about it. Wonders if she’ll ever be able to get up again if she goes to sleep now. “No,” she says, firmly. “Let’s—let’s do it now."

“Okay,” says Kes, knowing better than to ask if she’s sure, and slips his hand in hers, giving it a squeeze. She squeezes back.

They walk out to where the armory once was; it’s been turned into something of a garage, full of a bunch of landspeeders and the occasional speeder bike. Kes, of course, grabs one of the latter, a charmingly sleek Imperial number that he no doubt scavenged from Endor and gave a fresh coat of dark blue paint. He chuckles when he catches the look on her face, ducking his head, rubbing the back of his neck, before reaching over to hand her a helmet. “Cool, right?” he says, putting on his own, and climbing on.

She snorts, but swings on behind him. “Yeah, pretty cool."

“Hold on tight!” Kes calls back, as if she ever needs a reason to. The bike jolts into motion: it’s fast, and a smoother ride than she’s expecting; she never knows, with ground transport. The trees blur into twin walls of green around them, and Shara closes her eyes, getting a little lost in the feeling of it, of wind in her face and the sound of the jungle breathing around her.

It’s almost a disappointment when they stop.

She dismounts slowly, and takes a careful look around. They’re on a side of the jungle she doesn’t immediately recognize — she’d done a bit of exploring when they were based here, but most of it had been focused on the older, harder-to-reach temples that’d gotten lost among the Massassi trees once the population had been wiped out, over a thousand years ago.

There’s a lake a couple of yards away, and trees ringing a flat expanse of land carpeted by lush, blue-green grass. A thin, shiny yellow band winds around the majority of the clearing, held up by wooden stakes.

“That’s the boundary line,” Kes says; his hand is warm in hers. “Guy at the Settlement Committee told me we could ask for more, they’d probably give it to us, but we’d have to cut down some of the trees.” It’s more than enough, in Shara’s eyes; more land than she can even imagine using, though, in fairness, she’d been raised in a two-bunk transport ship and spent the rest of her adult life in military housing.

Kes leads her toward the opposite side of the property, where a row of pink-flowering bushes lie, looking deadly; perhaps it’s the spikes. They’re about halfway across when she spots the sticks and branches, stretched out on the ground, arranged in a too-linear-to-be-accidental patterns. “Wait,” Kes says, and she does; barely has the time to glance down at the stick at their feet before she’s being hoisted up off of hers, tucked up against Kes's chest, one of his arms under her knees and the other curled securely around her back.

“Kes!”

“Sorry! Tradition!” he says, laughing a little as he makes a bit of a show of stepping over the stick. “That’s the door,” Kes informs her, nodding back at it. “We’re in the hallway right now."

“What tradition?” she says, still a little stuck on the fact that her husband just scooped her up like that, without so much as a by-your-leave.

Kes blinks at her, and then blushes. “Oh. Just some—some old Core thing. With newlyweds, in their…when you get to your new house, you’re supposed to…” he trails off, and Shara decides to take pity on the man.

“Oh yeah?” she says, wrapping an arm around the back of his neck. “You gotta carry me around the whole time?"

“You want me to?”

Shara gives a casual, unbothered shrug and taps her fingers against his broad chest. “So we’re in the hallway."

Kes grins walks forward a couple of feet. “Kitchen,” he says, tipping his head toward the left, before turning right. “Guy from the Settlement Committee, Mr. Lilla, tells me we should put the 'den' here. I don’t know what that is, but he was real convincing."

“Well, if Mr. Lilla says."

Kes chuckles a little, and carries her over forward a few more feet. “Our room’d be right here. I was thinkin’, we could put in the windows, here, and here?" he nods to the wall directly behind her, and to the right of him. “Could look out over your ship that way, get a good view of the lake to the south. If the light’s right you can even see some of the old base, or so they’ve been telling me."

“Uh-huh,” says Shara, who’s absorbing most of what he’s saying, as he goes on about the ‘fresher and the complex marvels of plumbing that make its instillation possible, but is looking, primarily, at her husband: the strong line of his jaw, his freshly-shaved cheeks, the dark tuft of hair on his chin. The bright sparkling light in his dark eyes as he talks, the slight quirk of his mouth as he catches her looking.

“What?” he says, smiling.

“Nothing.” She runs the tips of her fingers along his jaw. "Poe’s room?"

“Other side of the kitchen.”

He carries her through it on the way, or, at least, where it’s going to be; it seems a bit big for her, more than twice the size of the galley on her father’s ship, but she’s not about to complain about that. Apparently the kitchen’ll look over her A-Wing as well, in addition to the storage units out back, and have a door of its own to lead to the yard.

“Here we go,” says Kes, when they reach Poe’s room, and Shara finds herself easing out of his arms. He helps, making sure to keep his arm around her waist to steady her journey to the ground, and then steps away.

The noise of the jungle, always so loud, dulls to a persistent, vibrating hum in her ears; around them, the ancient trees stretch into the sky. Their discarded branches decorate the lush grass below, sketching out a hazy vision of a future that Kes is talking about like he can run his hands along its walls already, like he could shelter from the rain under its roof right now.

Her breath catches.

Kes hears it, and looks to her with obvious, bare concern. Reaches out as if to offer comfort, and then retreats, seemingly worried about startling her.

“Shit, you don’t like it. I thought—I mean I knew you’d liked it when we were based here, but I guess that’s—different than livin’ somewhere, the rest of your life. Ain’t a problem at all, though, Shara Bey! Still got lots of options. You got any suggestions? Somethin’ in the Core? You like Naboo when you where out there? I hear it’s—"

“Kes."

“What?”

“I like it."

“Yeah?” he says, light, hopeful, grinning for a moment, but then he frowns. “You sure? ‘cause the town’s a bit far away. The three of us — or more, y’know if we…if you…well that’s… somethin’ else to talk about if you— well we’re all gonna have to be real friendly-like, all the time, ‘cause it’ll sure be close quarters. And it storms something awful, I know you remember _that_. And I mean, we ain’t exactly in the center of things, y’know? If you wanted to do that, keep in the center of things, it’d be—and we’re going to have to put up a fence, the _wildlife_ is something else around here, gotta make sure we’re watchin’ Poe _non-stop_.”

As if they aren’t going to be doing that anyway, for the rest of their lives. She lets out a laugh. Wipes at the tears that she hadn’t noticed streaking her cheeks, and then reaches out.

Kes takes her hand again.

“What else?” she says.

“Who says there’s something else?"

Shara gives him a look, raises her eyebrows, cocks her hip. He laughs, and tugs her forward, excited, like a kid again. “Okay. One extra room over here — could be a guest room, in case your dad wants to come and visit—"

“Oh yeah? How’s that going to go with the ‘real friendly-like’ plan?"

“That's up to your father,” says Kes, serious, but throws her a wink. “Could use it for storage, a study. Whatever we want."

“Another bedroom?” she says, pointedly. Kes ducks his his head, and shrugs.

“Up to you, Shara Bey.” He leads her outside again, and they round the perimeter of the house. “Thinking of putting in a little garden here,” he says, point at a spot Shara assumes to be in front of the kitchen window.

“You garden?” she says, strangely delighted at the possibility.

“I think I could learn,” he says, a little gruff, and Shara bites her lip, holding back a laugh.

“Well I learn something new about _you_ every day,” she says, sweetly, and he huffs, but doesn’t work very hard to hide his smile.

“We’d put the storage units back there.” He waves toward the flowering pink death bushes. “Plenty of shade during the day, and it’d leave you enough room to land the A-Wing, I think."

She nods; they might have to build a hangar for it, eventually. The moon’s humidity had wreaked havoc on their equipment the first time around, even with regular maintenance.

“The base is that way,” Kes points to their right, where she thinks she can see, beyond a dark blue lake, peeking out from beyond the lush green canopy, one of the old observatory towers. “They’re setting up a proper town a couple of miles north of us. Not much there yet, but it’s about fifteen minutes on the bike, we could go have a look later.”

“Okay,” she says, as they walk along the border of their plot. The boundary marker comes to about halfway up her thigh, and she lets the shiny yellow ribbon slide through her fingers, rubs lightly at the rough wooden stakes holding it up. Kes watches her out of the corner of his eye, not nearly as stealthily as he thinks, and with a tenderness that makes her blush and drop her own gaze.

They make it to the opposite end of the property, overlooking the spot where the house will be. They stop. Kes nudges his shoulder against hers. “Could put your tree out here."

“It’s not _my tree_ ,” she says, a little indignantly, but—it is. It will be. All of this will be, kind of, soon. Maybe, kind of, is already. She takes a breath.

“So?” he says, soft, not looking at her.

“Well,” she says, going for thoughtful. “I gotta say, it’s growing on me."

“Yeah?” Kes half-turns to look at her; she smiles.

“Yeah, I guess."

Kes grins, and turns all the way, moving in front of her and using his grip on her hand to reel her in close; she laughs and goes with it, tucks herself against the solid warmth of his chest, rests her cheek against his shoulder. He starts swaying his hips, humming a familiar song, and she laughs, automatically following his movements. Begins to sing along, quietly, almost under her breath.

It’s not a song to dance to, really, but somehow, together, they manage.

*

**Author's Note:**

> Theoretically, [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXL4Q6ZXYmI) could be the song Kes & Shara dance to at the end of this fic. Of course, given the lyrics, it would be tragically ironic if that were the case, sooooo.
> 
>    
> ([come & talk to me about the DamFam on tumblr if you want](http://morethanonepage.tumblr.com/))


End file.
